record company

Saturday Joel sent off this art which he created to San Francisco. I sent the music by Fedex air on a hard copy CD.

Part of what I do is produce CDs. It used to be only sounds I arranged and made. Once you figure out how to do it you add albums of other provenance realted to your niche.

This music was available only on reel to reel until now. While the EMU archives did a transfer to CD it was from a cassette made from a reel to reel and had skips and jerks.

Milton owns the reel to reel. Never played it. I might be in the photo. More and a link when it is released.

buckle up, in

Okay. This takes me back. In college, one year, I owned an Isetta. It had a single door--on the front. Power came from an Italian motorcycle engine in the rear. It was Italian.

I bought it from a foreman at Weaver's Poultry. Drove it to Eastern Mennonite in Virginia and sold it to Jim Bishop who had his first date with his wife in it.

What is this car? Deal with it. In twenty years this may be the only vehicle driving down Route 23, where this picture was taken.

Last uncle dies

My Aunt Jane called today and told me Uncle Irvin died shortly before 10 p.m. last evening, apparently in his sleep, between routine nurse checks. He was born in 1915 and was 92 yrs old. George, his son, who lives in Harrisonburg, Va., wants to wait until son Peter gets back from a truck run in Wisconsin to make final plans. As soon as I find out when the funeral is, I’ll look at my schedule to see if I can fit it in.

My uncle was known as G. Irvin. The G was George, the name of his father, my grandfather. There were eight sons in that family. My father, Lester, was the next to oldest. Irvin was the last of the boys living, the fourth youngest. Of the family of twelve children, only two remain—Aunt Jane and Aunt Gladys, the next to youngest and third to youngest.

I always liked Uncle Irvin and when I was twelve or so, stayed at his house the first time I (with parents) visited Milton at EMU. I was proud to have an uncle with a Ph.D. and a professor position at EMU. His first wife, Edith (Eddie), died about 1970, and that loss was catastrophic for their four children. The oldest, George, graduated from EMHS that year. I was proud to have an aunt who could play the piano pretty well, and I remember her banging out “Ben Hur’s Chariot Race March” one time in the early 1960s when they had a meal with my folks at Monterey. I promised myself I’d learn that awesome piece sometime, and I did a few years later.

She was a nurse by profession, and I visited her at work the last time I figured I’d see her, when Virginia Mennonite Retirement Community was not much more than one brick building, the last one on the left as you leave campus on Virginia Ave. I think it is, the street than runs next to MapleWood.

In the hayday of my growing up, I had seven uncles on the Groff side (five by marriage) and ten on the Lehman side (four by marriage) for a total of seventeen uncles. Uncle Irvin is the last family uncle. I have one uncle by marriage on the Groff side, Earl, who was a classmate of Uncle Irvin's at Manheim township high school.